DISOBEDIENCE NAOMI ALDERMAN PDF

People got married, got divorced, decided to have a baby, adopt a baby, foster a baby, to move to the country, to change career, to reconnect with estranged family members or to finally cut off their asshole dad. And people came out. A lot of people I knew came out in those months. A brilliant, moving documentary was released around that time, Trembling Before God, which was about the lives of frum lesbian and gay men and women. There was a routine that almost became standard that autumn and winter: invite your parents to visit you in Manhattan, everyone goes to see Trembling Before God together, then you come out to them. So that was all right then.

People got married, got divorced, decided to have a baby, adopt a baby, foster a baby, to move to the country, to change career, to reconnect with estranged family members or to finally cut off their asshole dad. And people came out. A lot of people I knew came out in those months.

A brilliant, moving documentary was released around that time, Trembling Before God, which was about the lives of frum lesbian and gay men and women. There was a routine that almost became standard that autumn and winter: invite your parents to visit you in Manhattan, everyone goes to see Trembling Before God together, then you come out to them.

So that was all right then. Who you happen to fancy is no bar to the frum life; Judaism, like most world religions, is much more interested in practice than in what you happen to think, believe or lust after quietly inside your mind.

But I heard a lot of coming-out stories in those emotionally intense months. Men whose rabbis had told them that even though they were only ever attracted to men they should try to get married to a woman anyway. An encounter with mortality clarifies so many things. What you would regret having done if your life were to end today.

In a funny way, I recommend it. What I learned was that the frum world — so warm, so communal, so sensible and safe in so many ways — was doing great harm to some of our people. And I learned as well that life can be excruciatingly unfair. That death will not necessarily wait for you to get your shit together. And got in. I began work on a novel about two women — Ronit, who had left the community and become a modern, secular woman, and Esti who had remained within the frum world.

They loved each other still, but it was complicated. I had to think it out for myself, on the page; it was the most urgent topic in my life and I wrote intensely, almost unable to think about anything else until it was done. No one in the frum world thinks gay people have demons inside them — the problems are different and so are the possible solutions.

But I was inspired by the bold way a new generation of writers was portraying its communities. When my novel went out to publishers we had offers within a few days. I mean that in two ways.

Giving up Orthodox Judaism was the major event of my early 30s, an unravelling and reknitting of self It surprises people sometimes to learn that yes, I was still frum while I wrote Disobedience. I kept the sabbath in Norwich, I ate kosher food — I even learned to make my own kosher sushi, because I had a yearning for it after years living in Manhattan. It was only once the novel was published, once the loud boom had started to echo away, that I found something unwinding within me.

It turned out that when I was done with the book, I was also done with the frum. Giving up Orthodox Judaism was the major event of my early 30s, an unravelling and reknitting of self that took me the best part of a decade to feel complete, solid and peaceful again.

There were other echoes, outside my own life. When Disobedience was published, my historian father worked out that it was the first novel about the frum community in Britain since Daniel Deronda In Israel, there have been brilliant television series set in the frum community there: Shtisel and Srugim are fantastic pieces of work.

Disobedience now looks to be part of a larger movement, the artistic opening up of the closed world of frumkeit. And now Disobedience is a film. This is Rachel Weisz. But one learns as a writer to take these things always with a pinch of salt. I read drafts of the script, commenting on the accuracy of details of the frum world.

And yet I still managed to be surprised on the day the filming started.

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She left London years earlier, is now working in finance in Manhattan but the death of her father Rav Krushka brings her back home. The novel is about the meeting place between religion and modern life, between sexuality and spirituality, between our own desires and the demands of the communities we live in and the God we worship. It is about the power of silence and the power of speech, and the quintessential human characteristic of disobedience. Here are some reviews

Coming out: Naomi Alderman on leaving Orthodox Judaism behind

No more. Disobedience is the latest example of a London-inspired genre, the novel as spicy neighbourhood tell-all. Disobedience, according to its considerable advance publicity, blows the cover of just such a group. It tells the tale of a love triangle in the orthodox Jewish population of Hendon, one of the closer-knit squares on the A-Z patchwork. The plot, also, sits too heavily on the book. A world-class Jewish sage, hailing from Hendon, has died. Alderman has produced some stirring short stories, elliptical and graceful, but this feels like writing-by-numbers.

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